All Work

On Friday, Melissa White, the CEO of an online condom retailer, attacked the findings of a study that found a small number of the condoms she sells on her website contain a chemical carcinogen called nitrosamines. In doing so, she misrepresents both our report and its conclusions.

August 1 is the one-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act regulation requiring no cost-coverage of women’s preventive services—including contraception—going into effect. Now we can also celebrate the fact that Plan B One-Step is finally on store shelves across the country.

It is incredibly frustrating that the very women the federal Medicaid law is intended to protect are the ones who are hurt the most, but those sanctions are the only tool HHS has at its disposal to enforce the law.

Women of color experience much higher unintended pregnancy rates than their white counterparts. As a group they also suffer higher rates of chronic diseases, including pregnancy-related conditions, which can be prevented with consistent use of contraceptives. The new regulation guaranteeing access to contraception without a co-pay will help greatly with these and other health issues.

The Shaheen Amendment currently has 12 cosponsors. It should have all 100. This amendment should be entirely non-controversial and should appeal even to those who generally oppose abortion but are sympathetic to its need in cases of rape or incest. Even the Hyde Amendment — the original ban on government coverage for abortion — allows for abortion in those circumstances.

A broad religious exemption for contraceptive coverage would go too far, depriving millions of women of an important health benefit. Instead of expanding exemptions, we should be expanding access to affordable care.

Mississippi voters yesterday soundly defeated Initiative 26, the so-called Personhood Amendment, by a margin of 58 percent to 42 percent. The vague proposition, which would have defined a fertilized egg as a person, threatened a multitude of untold consequences.

Until the Hyde Amendment is repealed and poor women receive adequate support for all of their reproductive health needs, rich and poor women will continue to live in two different countries with two different sets of rights.

The widely-celebrated court decision striking down Proposition 8 is important for many reasons, not least because it underscores that reproductive and sexual rights are integrally and intimately linked.

Opponents and supporters of abortion rights agreed early on, in theory, to maintain the "status quo" in health reform with "abortion neutral" legislation. Unfortunately, neither the House nor Senate versions preserves the status quo.

An analysis of the criteria originally set out by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops as priorities for health reform finds that the Bishops have moved the goal posts on their original insistence that reform be "abortion-neutral."

Opponents and supporters of women's choices in childbearing agreed early on, in theory, to maintain the “status quo” with "abortion neutral" health care legislation. The Senate bill achieves this goal; the House bill does not.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was among the first to call for an “abortion-neutral” health care bill in July, defined as maintaining current policies on funding, mandates, and conscience protections. But then they reneged on the deal.

Creating a comprehensive approach to the reproductive health and
parenting needs of women is an important policy objective in its own
right, regardless of any potential subsequent effect on the abortion
rate.

Creating a comprehensive approach to the reproductive health and parenting needs of women is an important policy objective in its own right, regardless of any potential subsequent effect on the abortion rate.

HHS has released its proposed regulation to “help protect health care providers from [religious] discrimination.” The good news is it no longer attempts to re-define abortion to include birth control. But the regulation no longer defines pregnancy or abortion at all.

In the pro-choice community, we spend most of our time debating the options women should have when they are thinking about terminating a pregnancy. We rarely spend time, however, discussing what options women should have when giving birth. By the same token, maternal and birthing rights activists often do not address issues surrounding abortion in their own work.